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Graphic novelist Isabel Greenberg photographed by Metro at her north London home (Picture: Daniel Lynch)

Isabel Greenberg is the new face of comics. Not just because one look at this petite, pretty blonde confounds that still lingering old cliché that comics are only created and enjoyed by spotty adult males in unwashed Spider-Man T-shirts.

It’s because, now aged just 25, she was born around the time the graphic novel genre arguably arrived with Alan Moore’s Watchmen and hit puberty just as Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan won The Guardian First Book Award in 2001, marking comics’ official embrace by the British literary establishment.

‘Obviously, when I was younger I read The Beano and Asterix,’ she says, spiralling patterns into her cappuccino froth, ‘but the first comic that made me realise there was something else out there was Alan Moore’s The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen – which I bought because I thought it was a costume drama.

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‘After that I kept going back to Gosh! [the legendary London comic book shop], which was then opposite the British Museum, trying to find other books I liked among all the super-hero stuff.’

Scenes from TheEncyclopedia Of Early Earth by Isabel Greenberg (Picture: Isabel Greenberg)

Gosh!’s proximity to the British Museum is fateful.

Entitled The Encyclopedia Of Early Earth (though it’s not an encyclopedia – well, only a little bit), Greenberg’s debut graphic novel is a romantic, funny, utterly enchanting celebration of story-telling set ‘a long time after the Big Bang but long before the Permian or Mesozoic eras’ in the Arctic lands of Nord and Britanitarka, when creatures such as Nuffins and Gumps hopped over a snow-bound Earth ruled by an unsympathetic raven god with an en suite toilet called The Birdman.

‘I wanted to write about tribes and folklore – but I didn’t want to have to be anthropologically correct,’ she explains, ‘so I thought I would invent it. I know Game Of Thrones and The Lord Of The Rings have maps and different languages, so it isn’t wildly unprecedented. I always liked fantasy when I was younger – I loved Ursula Le Guin and her Earthsea Trilogy, and I just wanted to make up my own civilisation.’ Plus, she adds: ‘I hate drawing cars.’

That the winner of the Cape/Comica/Observer Graphic Short Story Prize would be drawn to the past is no surprise, given her parents create historical exhibitions – their biggest was the Terracotta Army at London’s British Museum.

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Her sister studies history at Oxford and Greenberg dithered between art school and studying classics.

‘I did Ancient Greek A-level,’ she cringes. ‘Don’t put that in! It makes me sound super-nerdy. I was absolutely awful at the translation stuff. I just really liked the stories.’

A scene from TheEncyclopedia Of Early Earth by Isabel Greenberg (Picture: Isabel Greenberg)

Greenberg is a natural story-spinner. The Encyclopedia Of Early Earth is a captivating, Scheherazade’s web of a book, fluidly visualised in woodcut-style markings which, as well as wowing the reader with Greenberg’s own, effortlessly playful imagination, reappropriates myths and parables such as Noah’s Ark and Cain and Abel, and humorously subverts them.

‘I think pretty much every story is nicked from somewhere,’ she says.

‘When I started out, I think I thought that because this was a Jonathan Cape graphic novel, it has to be all serious and have gravitas. Then, about half-way through, I realised I was kind of allowed to do what I wanted and that I didn’t want to be pompous, so I decided to write the book how I spoke rather than how I thought a serious folk story should be. It needed to be in my own voice, otherwise I was just retelling existing stories.’

It took Greenberg many years to find her own voice. ‘I didn’t do any comics my entire time at university,’ she says of her time studying illustration at Brighton.

‘Nobody said not to but I remember once doing one and the tutor saying something along the lines of: “This is very nice but I don’t really understand what it is”.’

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That institutional mindset is something Greenberg is out to change. This autumn, the young north Londoner has her first lecturing job at Worcester University.

‘I’m super-excited,’ she says, her eyes lighting up.

Artwork from TheEncyclopedia Of Early Earth by Isabel Greenberg (Picture: Isabel Greenberg)

I ask if she feels it’s important to encourage the next generation of female graphic novelists.

‘I would rather not be referred to as a “female comic artist” – just a comic artist,’ she says. ‘But I guess that will come naturally. I have always found, in Britain at least, there is a pretty even gender distribution.

‘Jonathan Cape has loads of great female authors such as Hannah Berry, Simone Lia and Kate Beaton. I don’t feel sidelined at all.’

Instead, she is just getting on creating her own worlds in her own way, moulding and evolving the form to suit her.

‘When I first planned the book, it was going to be like a fake encyclopedia with loads of pages of animals and then it was going to be a collection of short stories,’ she says.

‘But when I started writing it, I realised I wanted to have a proper narrative because, when I read a graphic novel, I feel it is a lot more satisfying if there is a proper plot.

‘I love comics but it is rare I find one that leaves me feeling the same way as if I had read a Hilary Mantel book or something. I wanted to write a graphic novel that left people feeling satisfied as if they had read a normal novel.’